Book reviews

Are we heading towards a digital dystopia? Q&A with author Sam Byers

I don’t really believe in reality, if I’m honest. I think our sense of the so called real and familiar world is so mediated and constructed, so dependent on our personal position and experience, so shaped by the agendas of those in power and by our own desperate need to make sense of the chaos through the imposition of narrative that really all we can meaningfully talk about is layers of fictions, or interrelated spheres of conflicting and complimentary imaginaries.

Ctrl alt dlt: a chronicle of the nervous breakdown of liberal media politics but what next?

Tom Baldwin has been on a rollercoaster ride of media and democracy in the UK (and USA) for the last few febrile, fetid and fantastic decades. As someone who has worked for left and right wing newspapers and for politicians and Great Causes, he knows how the punches have landed.

Filling the Void: How to Talk to an Audience that Doesn’t Want to Listen

What is the role that emotions play in the use, and misuse, of social media? According to journalist, lecturer and author Marcus Gilroy-Ware, much of the excessive use of social media is compulsive, automatic, and a result of hedonic, emotional relationship we have with social media.

‘Post-truth’: a myth created by journalists?

Post-truth: the new war on truth and how to fight back by Matthew d’Ancona

John Lloyd has already reviewed these two books better than I could have done. I share his view that the existential threat of ‘fake news’ is sometimes exaggerated and that we’ve been in informational crises before. If Hillary […]

“I get all the news I need from the weather report”
(Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel: Only Living Boy In New York)
Media is now environmental, like the air we breathe. It’s a ubiquitous and vital fact of contemporary life, like the water from our taps. It is a […]

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